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<div>Online gendered collectivities like the Manosphere (an online collection of blogs, forums, and chat spaces devoted to shedding light on perceived social misandry) have provided opportune spaces for regressive forms of gendered organizing to occur. These spaces offer individuals an online network of safe spaces dedicated to antifeminism, misogyny, and pick-up artistry. While Manosphere networks have gained attention with their connections to the emerging Alt-Right activism online, these spaces have been legitimized in and throughout specific social networking platforms. For instance, sites like Reddit (dubbed the ‘Internet Culture Laboratory’) have become known as a hotbed of misogynist behaviors fostered and shared on comment threads and its subcommunities (known as subreddits).</div><div><br></div><div>Whereas previous scholarship pertaining to the Manosphere and The Red Pill have described the larger technocultural spaces that contribute to an increasingly toxic online world, less studied is how these organizations are organized—particularly with a focus on gendered organizing. SubReddits may adopt and take organizational forms wherein organizing occurs primarily through communicative engagement between users in the spaces (e.g., sharing posts, commenting on posts, and supporting some ideas over others through Reddit’s ‘upvote’ currency system). Over time, spaces like The Red Pill are networked, enacted, and organized. With an aim of understanding how organizational identity is organized and enacted on The Red Pill’s subreddit, this study analyzed the Top 100 posts of all time (over 35,000 comments and roughly 6,000 pages of text data) from The Red Pill to understand how conversations and content enacted a masculine organizational identity.</div><div><br></div><div>Using a multi-level analysis, this dissertation examines members’ text-based engagement, the social network, and types of roles influencers adopt to construct an organizational identity for r/TheRedPill. Using the comment threads from the Top 100 posts of all time, text mining and semantic networks were generated to understand how members of r/TheRedPill construct meanings and concepts focused on the organizational identity of the space. Second, using social network analyses, this dissertation illustrated the networks of influence of central users within r/TheRedPill. With a goal of understanding the roles that central users adopted, the dissertation adopted an online observation of the space to create a typology of leadership roles within r/TheRedPill. The findings uncovered three distinct contradictory themes focused on masculinity, sexual activity, and backlash that were central to organizing in The Red Pill. In addition to these three themes, the social network analysis and observation revealed distinct roles that influencers adopted to promote the organizational identity of r/TheRedPill.</div><div><br></div><div>Theoretically, the dissertation contributes to the Communicative Constitution of Organizing online by showcasing how the interconnections between conversations around gender, sexual activity, and backlash ‘scale up’ to construct a gendered organizational identity. Methodologically, this dissertation utilizes multiple levels of analysis to investigate online organizational activity. Pragmatically, these findings help provide a rich portrait of alternative forms of gendered organizing that occurs online. Future directions include examining the broader Red Pill network on Reddit, as well as examining contrastive spaces (e.g., r/TheBluePill or r/ThePurplePill) to investigate how members’ discursive engagement organizes and constitutes organizational activity as a response to r/TheRedPill.</div>

The miscommunication between sender and receiver during transcoding indexes specific historical moments similarly to analog film's indexical trace. Iconography and glitch art begin to establish glitch's deictic index. The glitch aesthetic exposes societal paranoia by illustrating dependence on the digital and fear of system failure. With the advent of video sharing sites like Youtube and popular cyberfilms, the glitch aesthetic has evolved into a pop culture artifact.

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This study analyzes young women’s descriptions and conceptualizations of cyberviolence and cyberbullying, including how they both challenge and reify mainstream cyberbullying discourses. The central themes analyzed include the way(s) in which self-representation in social networking sites are constrained through the limited options young women describe as being available for self-expression in these spaces, how notions of publicity, privacy and context-specific communication in social networking sites factor in girls’ descriptions of platform architecture, and how platform architecture often amplifies cyberviolence. Finally, the study unpacks the reasons that young women offer to explain why adults are often so out of touch when it comes to understanding cyberbullying and its relationship to young people’s digital culture. This dissertation contributes to cyberviolence studies, feminist new media, and girls’ digital culture studies, and has relevance for critical feminist criminology, by centring the voices of young women in order to investigate cyberviolence through participatory video with a sizable number of young women. The findings are based on data collected through eight participatory video workshops, two co-produced short documentaries and six focus groups with one hundred and twelve (N=112) participants in total under the larger umbrella study “Cyber & Sexual Violence: Helping Communities Respond” (2013-2016). This project was a community partnership between the Atwater Library and Computer Centre in Montreal and the TAG Lab at Concordia University, and was funded by Status of Women Canada. I employ an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that puts feminist new media studies, feminist approaches to online misogyny and girls’ digital culture studies into conversation with the extant literature on cyberbullying and cyberviolence. This theoretical approach is used to examine how the social norms in the discourse communities of social networking sites that girls outline in their descriptions of cyberviolence are structured through age-old misogynistic myths and impossible contradictions around femininity. Employing a participatory arts-based feminist lens allowed me to invite participants to share their perspectives in an accessible and fun way while examining their work through qualitative thematic analysis. Among the many findings this research produced, three key themes extend as threads that run throughout the dissertation. First, my participants did not relate to the term ‘cyberbullying’ in the way that adults often use it. While researchers and policy-makers continue to debate how to define cyberviolence and cyberbullying, participant responses illustrated the need for more dialogue around the toxic social norms and assumptions that currently structure young people’s digital culture, mainstream cyberbullying debates and anti-cyberbullying programming. Secondly, young women’s focus on issues of publicity versus privacy, anonymity, and peer surveillance highlights both the nuances that girls’ voices contribute to ongoing cyberbullying debates and how social networking sites amplify age-old double standards facing women and girls in visual culture and the public sphere. Finally, the themes of empathy and education that emerged from participants’ suggestions for strategies with which to address cyberviolence underscore the systemic changes that will be necessary in tackling the continually evolving and widespread phenomenon of cyberviolence. Participants conceptualize cyberviolence and cyberbullying as existing along a continuum of daily interactions in social networking sites that include encountering everything from mean jokes to sexual violence.

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New media have become an essential element of our everyday lives. They are also a platform for digital art. Through them, readers can encounter so-called 'electronic literature' as a developing cultural form, allowing to some extent, the the mutual influencing of media and genres. Firstly, all electronic literature needs to be consistently differentiated from electronic books, similarly the conversion of classical, analogue works into a digital form. This thesis deals with the definition of this specific area of literature, its reflection, including its historical anchoring. This work is necessarily based on an interdisciplinary approach, it draws on concepts from literary theory, however electronic literature cannot be viewed through its paradigms alone, as traditional definition frameworks and concepts cannot be fully applied in the new media environment. There is also emphasis upon media studies' theory, specifically studies of new media. Concurrently, the work deals with a specific form of narrative, the so- called 'interactive narrative', which is not found solely in the works of electronic literature, but it also has a wide scope. The final section presents the results of the author's research focused on readers' response to selected works of electronic literature with an interactive...